I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends.
I is for Irene S.
Irene probably had the best sense of humor of any girl I knew. She was a hoot, and I think she had honed her wit as a defense mechanism because she wasn’t all that pretty. But she was magnetic and drew people to her like no one I ever knew before. I was sure that she could have had a successful future in stand-up comedy.
I tried to get close to her because she really tickled me and she was just so much fun to be around. But she didn’t respond to me the way I had hoped she would. When I finally got up the courage in the 8th grade to tell her how I felt about her, she got this look in her face, almost a look of pity, and told me that she really liked me a lot as a friend, but not in “that” way, meaning the way I liked her.
After that, we were friendly but not close and drifted apart. Before the end of that school year, she moved and I never heard from or of her again. But I used to periodically check to see if there were any stand-up female comics by the name of Irene on the circuit.
This, That, and the Other 
This is impressive.
An A to Z list of girlfriends (female lovers, in other words) would suggest an absolute minimum of 26 in total. Now I really don’t have access to reliable data on the matter, but I would have thought 26 such individual conquests in a lifetime to be somewhere around the average if not, indeed, a little above average. People tend to be unreliable in honest reporting of such matters – men tending towards exaggeration and women towards understatement. The data can be skewed.
But, of course, we are not really talking about 26 here, unless you have some kind of weird Darwinian programming about you, because there has to be a fair bit of doubling up somewhere along the line. Most people have, for example (I looked this up, it’s statistically reliable data) slept with at least 3 S’s, 2 N’s and a W before ever getting a Z between the sheets. The same applies to X’s. Most of us, to be honest, have had 3 or 4 R’s before we’ve even got past first base with a reasonably attractive Q.
So I’m going to be watching this very carefully. If things start sounding a bit fanciful towards the end of the alphabet I will be calling foul.
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You may notice that a number of these encounters did not involve female lovers so much as boyhood crushes that did not result in sex, in some cases because they took place long before I lost my virginity in the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. In fact, this letter I post resulted in my being rejected in the 8th grade.
And yes, there have been girls starting with the same first letter, but I had to choose the most memorable or interesting one. So it’s a mixed bag of successful and unsuccessful experience if you consider having sex to be the definition of “successful.” Is the real number of of former lovers 26? More? Less? I don’t know. I threw out my notched belt long ago.
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Nice name!
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Did you ever do stand-up comedy?
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No, but close, I used to teach high school and college kids 😂
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Great song pick too
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